Creatures of Habit

Warning: this post contains some (I'm sorry) observations about my commute.  Sorry again.  I never wanted to be one of "those" people who bang on about their cramped 'n' noisy journey to work as though a) they're the only ones who experience it and b) there's nothing more important going on in their lives.  But I'm not going to bang on about the cramped 'n' noisy part, OK...I'm going to do a little bit of cod-philosophising about it instead.  And as we all know, nobody in the history of the world has ever done that before so we're all safe.

I can't help it.  Especially since this morning, when I realised that I've started to lapse into a comfortable routine...I can now refer to my journey to and from work as 'regular', with 'my' train times reassuringly set.  Heaven forfend I catch an earlier or later train than 'my' one, even though they run every fifteen minutes or so.  Heaven doubly forfend if someone happens to be sitting in 'my' seat in 'my' carriage as well.  I am a rather depressing creature of habit.  Not a maverick; not someone who picks a different train and a different carriage every day just because (what bravery!)

I'm not the only one, though.  When I get on the train at 6:11am precisely, there is a dedicated little band of people who sit in my carriage every day, too.  They also choose the same seats.  In fact it's now got to the point where if one of them isn't there, the journey doesn't feel quite right.  Don't ask me why this is - one of them in particular is bloody irritating.  He sits in the seat directly in front of mine, he reeks of cigarette smoke and every time we go past Southend Airport he ostentatiously (in my opinion) cranes his neck to look back at the planes.  He does this every day even though it's dark outside and the view doesn't ever change anyway.  He also carries a crusty handkerchief and every morning without fail he's noisily blown his nose in it at least three times by the time we've got to Wickford.  And yet he wasn't there yesterday, and I missed him and wondered where he was.

There's also a woman who always sits adjacent to me, who puts her 'office face' on as we're rattling along.  Her routine (regardless of outfit colours) is: mascara, a quick blot of powder and then a slick of very red lipstick.  She sort-of irritates me as well, although I don't know if that's because putting my 'face' on in public is something I would never, ever do and that makes her a bit freer...more devil-may-care than I am (such reticence, I believe, comes from when I was a lot younger and my Nan, concerned about the fact that I might end up becoming too 'tomboyish' on account of not having a Mum around, gave me a book called 'Good Grooming for Ladies!' in the hope that it might inspire me to make an effort.  This book was published in 1949 and the first piece of utterly mad advice it gave was "your face must be a glamorous theatre performance...don't ever let anybody peek behind the scenes and see how the show is put together"  Marvellous isn't it?)

There's a few more as well...the mousy woman in the cream cardigan who looks like she doesn't ever brush her hair; the stocky man in the high-viz jacket who gets on at Rochford and reads the paper in his seat by the doors; the glamorous lady in the red fur coat who never gets on my train but is always standing by the coffee outlet as we whizz through Rayleigh.  They're all there, and I silently tick them all off in my head as I start the day, like some sort of strange imaginary school register.

Like I say, turns out I'm a rather depressing creature of habit.

Especially For You

I greeted Pete Waterman's announcement that he's putting together a Hit Factory tour this summer with initial delight, rapidly followed by a sense of trepidation.  Delight because - hey, Rick Astley, Lonnie Gordon and Jason Donovan on the same stage?  The possibility of Kylie and Jason reforming for one last performance of 'Especially For You' (a single I queued round the block outside Our Price to buy on its release date)? Stop it!  

I'm in my mid-thirties, so PWL's Hit Factory formed the sounds of my youth.  And to be honest, I'm immensely glad of it.  It was sneered at then; even more so now.  It doesn't carry the grinding right-on cachet of punk; it doesn't have the simpering fey flourish of the New Romantics.  But what you heard was, quite simply, what you got.  Glittering musical rainbows.  It was fun; nothing was ever taken too seriously, and it made you want to sing along and make up dance routines in your bedroom (something my best friend and I used to do religiously after school to Kylie, The Reynolds Girls and Mel and Kim - we'd then perform the dances to one another and 'grade' them; a bit like an early version of 'Britain's Got Talent'.  I was a notoriously low-grader and made her work for her 10s, whereas she thought everything I did was brilliant.  We're still best friends now, and life hasn't changed much since then!)  My wedding reception was heartened by the PWL mix I insisted on the DJ playing, much to the lament of my husband and the DJ himself.  "You'll be the only one dancing to that rubbish!" the DJ fumed, only half-joking.  But he was wrong.  The opening bars of 'Too Many Broken Hearts' caused a stampeding-elephant-like rush to the dance floor that just made me beam inside.

And yet...I felt trepidation because as I read the tour announcement I knew my phone would start beeping almost instantaneously with messages from excited friends (of around my age, natch) asking if I wanted to go along to Hyde Park and watch the show in all its glory.  Which it did.  But reader, I declined.  Why?  Well - without question it'd be a bit fun, but it'd also be a bit sad, too.  Everybody's twenty-five years older now, including us; I'm a bit worried that the songs wouldn't sound the way they did when we and they were young.  I suspect that now we'd find them all a bit...irrelevant.  I love Kylie and Jason, but they're not going to be able to pull off 'Especially For You' the way they did in the video (incidentally still one of my most favourite music videos of all time) because now we know how they ended up.  She left him for Michael Hutchence; he took too many drugs.  Watching them perform 'Especially For You' now would be like the first time you saw someone dressed up as Father Christmas once you knew for certain he wasn't real...pointless, a bit depressing and devoid of any magic.

So I think those songs and those performers need to be frozen in time and enjoyed the way they were then, not the way they are now.  I'll stick to the occasional evenings when I get my friends over and we watch my 'PWL Gold' video collection with a few bottles of wine; laughing at the utter state of the Reynolds Girls in their charity-shop leggings and freeze-framing Lonnie Gordon's constipated facial expressions in the video for 'Happenin' All Over Again'.  Whilst hoping that now, for all our sakes, it doesn't all start "happenin' all over again".